WHIPLASH(v): A strong jerk for us all

Whiplash is a movie about Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) who wants to be one of the great drummers and leave his mark on the world. The movie traces his journey at the cut-throat Shaffer conservatory. One of the main characters of the movie is Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) who is a music teacher. He leads a studio band of his handpicked musicians to the most competitive jazz competitions and Andrew is one of these handpicked musicians. At the beginning it is as if Fletcher sees a star student in Andrew and towards the end of the movie even says that he brought in another drummer only as motivation for Andrew. But Fletcher is not a hearts and compliments kind of guy. He pushes and pushes his students till they either break or become perfect. According to him there are no words in the English dictionary more harmful than ‘good job’. He pushed and pushed Andrew further and the question is will he be perfect or will he break? 

Miler teller and J.K. Simmons, both, give exceptional performances In Whiplash. J.K. Simmons portrays the fearful Terrance Fletcher to perfection. His gestures and words are both menacing and leave us feeling exactly the way Andrew might be feeling at that moment. Miler Teller embodies the scared, confused, unsure yet talented Andrew Neyman beautifully. We can feel his fear, pain and hard work through his expressions and body language. Great acting combined with Damien Chazelle’s acting and Tom Cross’s crisp editing make this movie reverberate within all our hearts.

After watching Whiplash, I was momentarily left feeling lost. The movie is so crisp and exciting that your body starts to vibrate to the thumps of the drum. But when it ends so abruptly you wonder what was it all for? One of the reasons this movie is so powerful and leaves such a drastic impact is because of the fast pace and the abrupt end. It takes you on a musical roller coaster and then throws you back out with a lot to think. Another reason why it is so powerful is because it addressees something that we all feel at one point or another, the need to push ourselves, the need to be great at what we do, the need to do something worthwhile... It's painful and beautiful at the same time and thus leaves us writhing with emotions.

Was Fletcher a negative influence or positive one? Was his method of teaching really molding greatness or inflicting emotional torture? What did his approval at the end of the movie mean to Andrew? 

This movie gives us a lot to think about and an overriding urge to do something worthwhile with our own lives. Thus, it’s safe to say even though Andrew’s journey ends abruptly for us, the feeling and emotions stay with us for a long time. Its not just Andrew's life but a universal story of how suffering can give rise to beauty and art.

  

The enigma that was Alan Turing: THE IMITATION GAME

SOMETIMES IT IS THE PEOPLE WHO NO ONE IMAGINES ANYTHING OF WHO DO THE THINGS THAT NO ONE CAN IMAGINE

The movie is based on the mathematician Alan Turing who designed a machine (Christopher) which broke the enigma code that shortened the Second World War by 2 years and saved millions of lives. 

Inventions don’t happen overnight. They take countess sleepless nights, even years to happen. But the beauty of The Imitation Game is that though it captures the process of the invention of this great machine that broke the unbreakable Nazi code of enigma, it also captures the social and emotional aspects of Alan Turing’s life. The idea was his but it was made possible only by the collective support and work of those on his team. 

This movie could have completely missed the mark and turned out to be exceptionally uninteresting but rather it was perfect, capturing all the technicalities and all the emotions. You feel excitement when the code is finally broken and the machine complete. You feel sympathy and sadness for Alan Turing. He brought the Second World War to an end but what did he get in return? Hormonal medication to cure his ‘homosexuality’...

Thus, the true enigma was the man who cracked the code. Alan Turing, a lonely boy had but one friend, Christopher for whom his first homosexual feelings developed (he later goes on to name his machine as Christopher). Thus he was a lonely boy with homosexual feeling and an obsession with solving puzzles. But not only did he crack the Nazi code he also married Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) so that she could stay and help break the code and do the work that she was so good at despite him being homosexual. He then tells her that he only married her because he wanted her help and now that the code was broken she should leave only because he wanted to protect her from the soviet agents amongst them. Also, when he was tried for ‘gross indecency’ he choose hormonal treatment over 2 years in prison because he did not want to lose Christopher (his machine) thus giving us a peek into the psyche of a child who never got over the fact that his first love had died and left him alone. 

Benedict Cumberbatch, playing the role of Alan Turing, is exceptional as ever. Keira Knightley and Mathew Goode (playing Hugh Alexander) also gave exceptional performances. The movie was written beautifully. While being full of emotions it was also very crisp, not dragging at any point. It was fast as well as slow, and perfectly so. So, Hats off to Morten Tyldum (director), William Goldenberg (editor) and the rest of the cast of The Imitation Game.

Alan Turing is a legend. I say this not only because of what he achieved but also because of what he endured. It was the suffering that Alan Turing had endured that made his life heart-breaking. He did not just break the enigma but he died without ever being recognized for it. He was socially awkward but he saved millions of lives. He was the man behind Britain’s victory in the Second World War but he was charged with ‘gross indecency’ and was chemically castrated. He kept the government's secrets while his own secrets were laid bare. It was all this that made his life even more beautiful. This reminded me of a quote from Troy, “The gods envy us. They envy us because we are mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.” Thus the thing that made this movie truly beautiful for me was suffering. 

Towards the end of the movie, the character talks about his paper ‘the imitation game’. The paper talks about a game in which the judge asks a few questions and then determines what his subject is. The question to ask ourselves is, are we human? Or are we things incapable of emotion?

Nuclear Disarmament in the Middle East

Nuclear disarmament refers to the process of elimination of nuclear weapons and in the end creating a nuclear-weapon-free world.

 

Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani, at the United Nations General Assembly, said “as long as nuclear weapons exist, the threat of their use exists”. This is the reason why nuclear disarmament is very essential. Nuclear disarmament in the Middle East is even more essential.

Of the four UN member states that have not signed the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Pakistan and Israel are two and nuclear power is possessed by Iran, Israel and Pakistan. Though Israel has never officially acknowledged the possession of nuclear weapons, however according to Federation of American Scientists, in a 2007 report, Israel has 75 to 400 nuclear warheads. Israel would use these nuclear warheads if it feels threatened by any nation in the Middle East like Iran. Till now, Iran’s official stand is that its nuclear research is aimed at peaceful purposes. But if it reaches weapon capacity, Israel will attack. Pakistan, which successfully tested its nuclear weapons in 1998, has stayed out of these conflicts. But Pakistan has close links with Saudi Arabia; Iran’s chief rival. Saudi Arabia has provided Pakistan with financial aid in the past, it is speculated that in exchange for this assistance, Pakistan agreed to provide Saudi Arabia with nuclear protection if Iran developed nuclear weapons.

With Iran’s uranium enriched facilities, it can reach nuclear weapon capability anytime in the near future. If this happens, it could start a nuclear arms race (which may have already started) or a nuclear war. In order to maintain peace in the Middle East it is important to prevent Iran for developing nuclear weapons. This can be done with force by destroying the uranium enriched facilities but this may not stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons and may even spark violence once again in the Middle East. To leave the lives of millions in the hands of a ‘may’ is not an option, for a nuclear war will not only take millions of innocent human lives but will also have a far reaching impact on the growth of the Middle East for generations as it did in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Thus the safest option is to establish a nuclear-free-zone in the Middle East.

Establishing a nuclear-free-zone in the Middle East is not an easy task as it will be very difficult to prevent all the countries from using nuclear weapons. Even if ONE country continues to develop nuclear weapons, so will the others and the threat of mass destruction will continue to persist. The process of establishing a nuclear-free-zone in Middle East will be long as we need to realize that it is not just about a nuclear arms race but also about protection and self-preservation for the Middle Eastern countries. It will require confidence building and trust building along with other political measures. This nuclear-free-zone will not only prove to be beneficial for the Middle East but also the entire world; along with strengthening the peace process in the Middle East it will also ensure peace in the entire world, for a nuclear war in the Middle East will suck in the entire world one by one and be the end of mankind as we know it.

INTERSTELLAR: space, love, hope and spoilers

 Christopher Nolan has done it again. He has brought us another amazing movie – INTERSTELLAR.  Interstellar is a futuristic movie in which Earth is nearing its end. Food is scare, dust is everywhere and people are dying of asthma. NASA physicist, professor Brand (Michael Caine), has been working on ways to save earth and mankind. For this he needs to send Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) , his daughter (Anne Hathaway) and 2 other researcher into another galaxy using a wormhole where they will have to find a planet that could be their new home. However, this movie is more than a space exploration movie. It is a movie about love and survival. Copper is a single father and he has promised his kids that he would come back home. To keep this promise he has to race against time as the other galaxy has a rotating black hole as its sun. The nearer they go to the black hole, more the time they lose as inside the gravitational pull of the black hole, hours can turn into years! At the same time, the team of researchers has to work as fast as possible so that they can find a solution while there is still an earth to save…

Truth be told, I was a bit disappointed. After Inception, I expected something out of this world. Literally speaking, Interstellar is ‘out of the world’ but it did not make me go ‘wow’ like Inception did. Space exploration is something that has been done so many times that the concept wasn’t new. But Interstellar is still a great movie. Firstly, the visuals of the movie are mind blowing. Although it is a fictional movie, most of the things in Interstellar have scientific groundings. The depictions of gravity, wormholes, black holes etc. are very realistic. And the concept of time as a physical dimension is also something that is being explored in the real world. No doubt, a lot of research went into the making of this movie and no doubt it has paid off.

Secondly, this movie is jam packed with emotions like love, loss and reunion. While everybody else is obsessing over the end of the movie, which I honestly did not find that confusing, I think that the real beauty of this movie lies in the innocence of a father-daughter relationship. Small instances like how Cooper is unable to tell Murph that he is actually going to save the world because he wants to protect her, how even after growing up the word of her father that they may both be the same age by the time he returns matters, how the father and the daughter have their own bubble which is more important than anything else in the world and a happy ending when they both reunite are the things that make this movie heartwarming and sets it apart from most of the movies that Nolan has done. 

Lastly, one thing that Inception and Interstellar have in common is that they both made me question what all is really possible. We all need to escape from reality now and then. In fact it is one of the reasons why I love movies; reality is never enough and we all need a little bit of magic, fiction and fantasy to help us believe that there is something more out there, something more meaningful and worthy than money, power and fame. And this is what truly made this movie great for me, because it gave me hope. And we all need hope living in this world full of greedy, stupid and inhumane human beings… 

Thus, Interstellar, while not as great as Inception, is beautiful and amazing in its own way. And who doesn't love Matthew McConaughey? Must watch.

15th November 2014

People leave and we feel abandoned and sad and pathetic. But the thing is that everyone comes back and it is just a matter of time. I have heard people say this all the time and I have caught myself believing that this is true because the alternative is just too depressing but it is also the truth. People don’t come back, not completely anyway. Things never go back to being the same. 

We ask people to promise that they won’t leave and we ask them if they will stay and when  they say yes we feel a moment of safety like we won’t have to feel abandoned and sad and pathetic anymore but the truth is that there is always something that can make them say “well I lied’. People always leave and that is just a matter of time. 

I have done it and now I know, very well, what the other person must have felt. I mean this entire year has been about people leaving and I guess I should get used to it by now but it still sucks the same. I just repress my feeling, ignore them and act like I don’t care. But the thing is that no matter how much you try to not deal with something, it still follows you around like a bitch. You start to feel sad and depressed and you just can’t figure out why. Over time you start to feel like you are not good enough because everybody leaves. You become insecure and under confident and keep trying to impress someone. You put on a mask to make people stay and then you wonder why you aren’t happy. And then they also leave and the cycle goes on. 

I guess people expect us to become stronger but I didn’t. I just became worse and needy and desperate. And I don’t know what to do. I make mistakes, no doubt. But I care and nobody cares back enough. And even thinking about them makes me feel even more pathetic like how could I even fall back into the same trap?? But I can’t stop myself from trying and believing that there is someone different out there. And this feeling, this hope is taking over my life. It’s like my life isn’t moving and I am waiting for something that doesn’t even exist and I can’t help it. 

Maybe in 5 years I will laugh at all the pity things that I used to care about but right now I can’t help but be stupid…